Hall-effect thruster

Each of those constellations is going to need thousands of thrusters every year.

The whole Hall thruster market today is, I mean, there's like 27 different producers of these systems, but only SpaceX has ever built more than 200 of them in a year, as far as we can tell.

They are not accelerating to scale at the rate that the industry is going to need them to.

So what we need to do is get the product to market on a timeline where since we're building in a chip fab we sort of have chip fab scale economics built into our systems it's expensive and hard to stand up at chip fab process but once it's stood up the chips individually are rather cheap and they can be produced in mass like you know I think even if we serve the entire thruster market as we project it, which is optimistic because we're a startup that is optimistic.

I will always look to see if it scares me, but I haven't seen anything that scares me yet.

I think there are some really... good use cases for other propulsion technologies in sort of the far reaches of the field.

I think if what we're building works the way we think it will, we will make the Hall Thruster obsolete full stop.

Like there won't be a reason to fly that tech anymore.

That hardware, ion drive or plasma gun, has to survive a slow sandblasting by plasma.

Another major family is the Hall Effect Thruster.

Hall Thrusters use electric and magnetic fields to ionize and accelerate propellants in a channel.

They usually have lower specific impulse than the best gridded ion engines, but they can produce more thrust for their size and power, and they are extremely useful for satellites and deep space missions.